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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Google Inc. will stop censoring its search results in China and may pull out of the country completely after discovering that computer hackers had tricked human-rights activists into exposing their e-mail accounts to outsiders.

The change of heart announced Tuesday heralds a major shift for the Internet’s search leader, which has repeatedly said it will obey Chinese laws requiring some politically and socially sensitive issues to be blocked from search results available in other countries. The acquiescence had outraged free-speech advocates and even some shareholders, who argued Google’s cooperation with China violated the company’s “don’t be evil” motto.

The criticism had started to sway Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who openly expressed his misgivings about the company’s presence in China.

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NEW YORK (AP) – A federal appeals court in New York has revived a lawsuit that accuses major record labels controlling 80 percent of U.S. digital music sales of scheming to charge high prices.

The lawsuit brought by music purchasers had been tossed out by a lower court judge.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said Wednesday that the lawsuit can proceed. It said there are enough facts to consider the claims.

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On June 26, 1997, in the first Internet-related U.S. Supreme Court case ever to be decided, seven justices found the disputed provisions of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Justice John Paul Stevens delivered the opinion of the Court, and was joined by Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kennedy, Scalia, Souter, and Thomas. Justice O’Connor filed a separate opinion, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist, concurring in the decision but dissenting in part.

Decision Highlights:

The opinion was a ringing endorsement of the Internet as a “dramatic” and “unique” “marketplace of ideas.”

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FTC BEGINS COMPREHENSIVE PRIVACY REVIEW THROUGH PUBLIC ROUNDTABLES

On December 7, 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began the first of three public “Exploring Privacy” roundtables. To an extent, the FTC is at a similar stage as it was in 1989 when it held its conference on online profiling (now referred to as “behavioral targeting”) that led to a recommendation to Congress for “legislation that would set forth a basic level of privacy protection for all visitors to consumer-oriented commercial Web sites with respect to profiling.”[i] The recommendation was withdrawn under the Bush Administration to determine whether the newly established Network Advertising Initiative’s (NAI) self-regulatory standards would prove sufficient.

In 2007, the FTC revisited this issue with its “behavioral targeting” workshop that led to the FTC proposing self-regulatory principles on behavioral targeting for the online advertising industry to adopt.[ii] The FTC’s “suggested” principles were not warmly received by the industry. By 2009, however, the NAI and a coalition of major trade groups including the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) each released proposed principles addressing behavioral advertising.[iii]

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Facebook Privacy Changes Claimed as Unfair and Deceptive

On December 17, 2009, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) petitioned the Federal Trade Commission claiming that changes to Facebook user privacy settings constituted an unfair and deceptive practice.

In early November and December, 2009, Facebook changed the process by which users set their respective privacy settings. EPIC alleges that the changes are confusing, replace the simple complete opt-out of information sharing through the Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect functions, and require third party application users to provide developers with personal information that users formerly would have been able to prevent application developers from accessing. The complaint requests that the FTC compel Facebook to restore its former privacy settings.

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Dear Blog Members: In this first blog I have posted information that was obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s website relating cyber crimes and computer intrusions. As an attorney, I believe that consumers need to be aware of the risks involved in using computers at home or your workplace. Please read the following excerpt and contact me if you have any questions or concerns.

My website is

www.atrizadeh.com. Thank you!

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